The Refugees eBook

Louis sprang impatiently from his chair, and caught
up his cane. “I wish,” said he, “that
you would imitate these people who seem to you to
be so formidable, in their excellent habit of doing
things for themselves. The matter may stand
until our council. Reverend father, it has struck
the hour of chapel, and all else may wait until we
have paid out duties to heaven.” Taking
a missal from the hands of an attendant, he walked
as fast as his very high heels would permit him, towards
the door, the court forming a lane through which he
might pass, and then closing up behind to follow him
in order of precedence.

CHAPTER III.

THE HOLDING OF THE DOOR.

Whilst Louis had been affording his court that which
he had openly stated to be the highest of human pleasures—­the
sight of the royal face—­the young officer
of the guard outside had been very busy passing on
the titles of the numerous applicants for admission,
and exchanging usually a smile or a few words of greeting
with them, for his frank, handsome face was a well-known
one at the court. With his merry eyes and his
brisk bearing, he looked like a man who was on good
terms with Fortune. Indeed, he had good cause
to be so, for she had used him well. Three years
ago he had been an unknown subaltern bush-fighting
with Algonquins and Iroquois in the wilds of Canada.
An exchange had brought him back to France and into
the regiment of Picardy, but the lucky chance of having
seized the bridle of the king’s horse one winter’s
day in Fontainebleau when the creature was plunging
within a few yards of a deep gravel-pit had done for
him what ten campaigns might have failed to accomplish.
Now as a trusted officer of the king’s guard,
young, gallant, and popular, his lot was indeed an
enviable one. And yet, with the strange perversity
of human nature, he was already surfeited with the
dull if magnificent routine of the king’s household,
and looked back with regret to the rougher and freer
days of his early service. Even there at the
royal door his mind had turned away from the frescoed
passage and the groups of courtiers to the wild ravines
and foaming rivers of the West, when suddenly his
eyes lit upon a face which he had last seen among
those very scenes.

“What! De Catinat! Ah, it is a joy
indeed to see a face from over the water! But
there is a long step between a subaltern in the Carignan
and a captain in the guards. You have risen
rapidly.”

“Yes; and yet I may be none the happier for
it. There are times when I would give it all
to be dancing down the Lachine Rapids in a birch canoe,
or to see the red and the yellow on those hill-sides
once more at the fall of the leaf.”